Introducing Resident Dragon: The Trials and Tribulations of Living in a Shared House with a Dragon in the Suburbs

Resident Dragon Cast Poster 01 - Prints available from https://dragon.arttimeproductions.com

Resident Dragon Cast: TET, Red the Dragon
Cool Froyd the Cat, and Grrr Dog.
Buy Prints of finished toons.

Last year (2024), for my birthday in May, my sister bought me a quality, metal bodied, ball point pen (black ink).

As someone who likes to sketch with ball point pens, and with a big concern that these last few years I really wasn't drawing as much as someone who considers themselves to be an artist should, I decided to put the pen to good use.

In June of the same year I bought two A5 sketchbooks and spent as much time as I needed to fill a page with ball point pen 'doodles', each morning after breakfast.

I'm predominantly a cartoonist who's always drawn from imagination, so filling a page in a sketch book is not a challenge. I just draw a line, or a circle, or whatever and see what emerges.

Filling Sketch Books Just to Draw More

Filling an A5 sketchbook page would take me about 20-25 minutes. I drew all kinds of random things, occasionally using the time to learn how to draw things by looking up a reference image or two. Giraffes is one specific example.

I knew how to draw a simple cartoon giraffe, but I learnt how to draw a more realistic giraffe looking at reference images online. I also learned they're remarkably like drawing a horse with really long legs (and neck, of course).

You can actually see every page of my sketchbooks on my Instagram account, starting from June 30th 2024.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by David Arandle (@etourist.tet)

Bringing the Resident Dragon Cast Together

About a month in, drawing random images daily was starting to get pretty old so I thought I'd use my page to start learning how to draw Cool Froyd the Cat as a fully realized cartoon character.

If you're a long time follower you may know that Cool Fryod started out as a pencil doodle sketch I did while in College studying Graphic Design between 1992-1994.

I turned the sketch into a full color acrylic painting in 2009. In 2013 I took the painted image and rigged him as an animated character using Cartoon Animator (then known as CrazyTalk Animator). You can see him in his third animated short in my Animation and Video Life Blog (and get the history) in this post, Cool Froyd, Episode 3: Gardening - Animated Short by TET.

The problem being, I wanted to do more than just have the painting move. I wanted to animate him walking, and basically moving around more like an animated cartoon character should.

At the time I'd already teamed Froyd with my own cartoon TET Avatar, Grrr Dog (another character rigged from a single image doodle turned painting), and Red the Dragon - who was created specifically for a St. George and the Dragon animated short made for Reallusion's Animation@Work competition.

The intention was to make an animated series titled Resident Dragon, which I wrote about, again in my Animation and Video Life Blog, in my post, Can a Solo Animator Make an Animated Feature Film or TV Series? It's worth a read as you get much of the premise of the series in the image joke cartoon captions.

So far I've scripted three of the six episodes for season one. Each episode is no longer than five minutes at most. I've fully storyboarded the first two episodes (something I used my morning sketching time to do. You can see those storyboards on my Instagram).

The only complete, animated short so far is a Christmas special, Resident Dragon: Christmas List

The main problem with all these characters is that I only have one angle character rigs of them. Also the body on my TET Avatar is not my artwork (the head is). So after Froyd, I set about using my 20 minutes after breakfast to teach myself how to draw all the Resident Dragon characters from any angle.

The Birth of almost One Hundred Resident Dragon Cartoons

That grew into drawing them all in the same scene together, which grew into drawing a single image gag cartoon for Resident Dragon a day. Which lead to gradually digitally inking and coloring each cartoon into a finished piece that I'm selling as prints, in three different sizes, suitable for framing, in my Resident Dragon Store.

Although I only have eleven completely finished gag cartoons, I'm actually coming up to my one hundredth sketch cartoon in the series as I'm writing this - I think I'm around cartoon 91 or 92?

Since I'm only completing the final cartoons very slowly I thought I'd introduce readers of this blog to the series, so I can make an occasional post of completed cartoons. Maybe a post featuring five toons, since I'm currently drawing them five days a week with each of the five toons relating to the same theme. It's another way I can get the word out there, and the cartoon is literally TET Life, since my avatar's name is TET, and the toon is about his life living with a Resident Dragon.

Eventually I hope to release a book of finished toons, along with other merchandise. As well as pushing on with creating my animated series too.

In the mean time, if you want to see each cartoon sketch as I draw them head over and follow my Instagram account (or my Art Time Productions Facebook Page).

I hope you've enjoyed this little insight into the birth of what is likely my most consistent cast of cartoon characters I've drawn since I came up with my Street Kids cartoons back when I was a teenager in high school. Which you can get a glimpse of in my Brooklyn Art Library Sketchbook below.

Comments

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

TV Series Review: The Penguin (2024) No Spoilers

W hile we wait for an eternity (well an eternity in movie fan years anyway) for The Batman Part 2 , sequel to Matt Reeves acclaimed, The Batman (2022), we have, what is essentially a direct sequel with The Penguin , a limited. eight episode, TV Series set within a week or two of the end of the first film. Unfortunately it's a direct sequel to Colin Farrell's Penguin rather than Robert Pattinson's, Bruce Wayne/Batman. Fortunately that's the only real disappointment I have with this series. Right from the first episode The Penguin establishes itself as a show for grown ups who enjoy actual character development, that hooks you in, is thought provoking, and raises questions that you expect will be answered as the story unfolds. After the events of The Batman, there is something of a power vacuum left in Gotham's crime world that Oswald 'Oz' Cobb a.k.a. The Penguin, sets out to fill using his experience, quick thinking, and his ability to hustle his way into...

Movie Review: Memory (2023)

S omething a little different for me in terms of movies I usually review, Memory is a film I was invited along to see by my partner, and both of us didn't know much about the movie going in, other than it was a film where one of the leads has dementia. The basic premise follows adult, special needs social worker, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), who leads a simple and structured life. When Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion the surprise encounter profoundly impacts both of their lives. The film starts out very awkward and disjointed to some degree, which I feel is intentional, to reflect that Sylvia, who is also a struggling single mother, is fairly resilient, she is, in many ways, just barely holding everything together because she doesn't have any other option. When Saul sees Sylvia at their high school reunion it seems like some unpleasant memories from her past are fast tracked into the forefront of her life, and things move forward fro...

Movie Review: The Fall Guy (2024) Minor Spoilers

W hen I initially heard they were making a movie version of the TV series, The Fall Guy (1981-86) , I was definitely interested, as a person who tuned in to that series, weekly, when it originally aired. I had intended to see The Fall Guy in the cinema but, for whatever reason, didn't get there, and didn't prioritize seeing the film as the reviews, and more importantly, general information about the movie came out. Specifically, The Fall Guy makes no effort to capture whatever magic it was the TV show had that made it the show it was. A fact that is driven home by the reworked TV series theme song, played over the end credits and behind the scenes footage of stunts in the film, that removes all references to real world actors and replaces iconic line of "I'm the unknown stuntman who made Redford such a star" with the nonsensical "I'm the unknown stuntman who tries to win your heart." - sure... I guess... I mean, the original song is about never gett...

Social Media: It's All Fake News - Even That News You Shared, That Proves the Thing, Because It's Backed Up By a Credible Expert, is Fake.

Social Media profiles need a peer based rating system that locks you out for 30 days if your feed is one long stream of depressing boredom that bums everyone out. I don't watch or read the news anymore (mainstream or otherwise). From time to time, if something filters through that piques my interest, I'll take a bit of a dive to find out more. The recent US election is a good example. I even wrote a few opinion pieces in this blog. The Daily Show Is Not News Note that I don't count The Daily Show as news, because I did watch quite a lot of that during the US election. While they lean quite a bit toward the left overall, it's not a show you look to for context, since much of their humor is based on reframing context to get a laugh. The one thing The Daily Show does well is highlight how both Liberal and Right wing media latch onto one or two bullet point messages each day and run them through the mouths of every on screen commentator like they're all wind up parro...

TV Series Review: Velma (2023-2024) No Spoilers

A s a kid, Scooby Doo cartoons were something I used to watch fairly regularly. I wasn't a diehard fan but it was one of the better, of the many, cartoons I used to watch. I had heard about the new animated series, Velma , around the time of its release but it wasn't coming out on any streaming service I was subscribed to so it went off my radar pretty quickly. Quite by chance I signed up to a streaming service so I could watch DC Entertainment's, The Penguin, and noticed Velma was on that platform. I figured I may as well get my money's worth out of the subscription. I did know that Velma, herself, had been race swapped for the show, which made no real difference to me, though I do prefer classic Velma if pushed to choose. However the first episode of season one was a real shock to my expectations! No where had I heard this series was skewing very much into adult humor and themes. I was expecting something more along the lines of the original Scooby Doo show. Instead I...

Trump's 2024 Election Win Will Change Everything - At Least I Sure Hope It Does!

Trump by Leonardo.ai & TET A s an outsider looking in on the US 2024 election, right up until election day, it is beyond my belief that the election continued to be a 'close race'. It is even further beyond my belief that Trump won, without question. Even if the Democrats wanted to claim the election was rigged somehow (which I'm sure Trump was gearing up to do had the outcome been different) it would be hard to make the case, beyond a recount. There's no slim margin here. Trump clearly won. While I would've preferred a Blue win, I at least got one outcome I was hoping for. A clear winner on election day. If I could give the Democrats some free, unsolicited advice for the next election. Stop targeting the opposition as if they're somehow selfish, evil villains. That's not how political parties work. At the end of the day the all represent the public. The people. The everyday citizen who you're trying to convince that you have what it takes to meet t...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog